In the construction of modern buildings, it has become customary practice to string tubing and/or electrical cables along the bottom faces of floor slabs prior to finishing operations on the building and to support such tubing or cables at regularly spaced intervals near the building walls. Recently, equipment has been devised to enable workers standing on the floor below to power nail suitable tubing or cable support clips or brackets to the bottom of the next uppermost floor slab in the desired spaced relationship, such as several feet apart. Such equipment involves a supporting pole for a power nailing gun and means to trigger the gun without climbing a ladder. The tubing or cable support elements may consist of simple L-brackets to which the tubes or cables may be tied, or various types of spring metal clips to which tubes or cables can be supportingly engaged after installation of the clips.
In addition to lack of standardization and excessive cost, the prior art supporting elements have had the common failing of being unidirectional with respect to the direction or axes of tubes or cables being supported thereby, and the support elements in the prior art are not well adapted to support plastic tubing around relatively sharp corners without cutting or cracking it.
The objective of the present invention is to completely overcome the above and other deficiencies of the prior art by providing a more simplified, economical, safer and much more efficient and convenient support for tubing or electrical cables in buildings. More specifically, the invention provides a support element which is omnidirectional and well adapted to guide and support tubing or cables around corners without cracking or cutting it. The support element forming the main subject matter of the invention is unitary in construction and molded from an inexpensive tough and durable plastics material having a sufficient degree of resiliency to yield and produce the required snap action when tubing or cables are engaged between it and an adjacent ceiling or wall surface, as the case may be. Preferably, the support element is formed of a polycarbonate.
A further advantage of the unitary molded plastics device is the inability of the device to cut or damage the tubing or cables or the hands of workers installing the latter, and this is in contrast to the prior art metallic spring clips and brackets.
Other features and advantages of the invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art during the course of the following detailed description.